Beating people up isn't market activity - it's at least borderline criminal. Every 14 year old Libertarian will bleat "but that's force" and they'd be right :)

Beating people up isn't market activity - it's at least borderline criminal. Every 14 year old Libertarian will bleat "but that's force" and they'd be right :) I agree wholeheartedly - you can't get two, much less three people to agree on market failures. My bias is that they simply don't happen or only happen very rarely , that wealth and power are almost completely illusory and conflate status and money to an embarrassing degree. I think that some people like stories about oppression ( I used to be one of those people ) and that this explains much of how it is that people disagree about this. A good way to challenge this belief is to read "Chief", a bio of Hearst by David Nasaw. This is why I refer to the Hearst morgue as feedstock for history - it's a lot bunk in that role, but every single person who reads history in what americans call high school gets it full in the face, and it takes some doing to get past it.